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Tuesday, 12 November 2013

Presenting: Neo4j!

Last week, I had the great pleasure of spending some time working on a BI-centric presentation of neo4j. Tereza subtly re-introduced me to Prezi, a presentation format that I had already used a couple of years ago when I was still working for Imprivata. I found that a great tool had only gotten better, and that it was actually quite a lot of fun to store and present neo4j this way. After all - when you think of presentations in general, and prezi more specifically - it's actually quite easy to represent any presentation/process as a graph.

So I had this weird idea: what if I would create a prezi-presentation about neo4j, and a simple but complete little neo4j database that would essentially contain the same information as the prezi - so that people could explore neo4j - in neo4j. Neo4j presenting itself in a neo4j database. I know - it's a bit of a joke. But here goes anyway.

Creating the prezi

I spent a bit of time acquainting myself with the new prezi interface, and created this prezi:

I actually quite like the result. It's a nice overview presentation - and I must say I am particularly proud of the "elevator pitches" that I created.

The Elevator Pitches

An elevator pitch is supposed to explain a concept to another person, while you're in the elevator together. Depending on the size of your typical high-rises, that means that you would have between 10-20 seconds. Short. So how do you explain neo4j in that time? Well, I think the trick is to know - or at least make some assumptions about - who you are talking to, and tune the story to the audience.

Last week, in just a few days time, I had multiple "graph database virgins" (people that had no idea what it was, and that sometimes also did not have a lot of technical baggage) ask me "what neo4j was". And even today, I still found it challenging. Here's what I came up with to explain neo4j to "mom & pop":

There's a couple of other "pitches" in the prezi, covering other audiences like developers, architects, project managers, CIOs and business managers. I am sure they are not perfect - I would love some feedback on these if you feel like it - but hey, Elevator Pitches are not meant to be perfect. They are meant to cause interest, so that the conversation can continue.

But then I wanted to have some fun and put the prezi into neo4j.

Creating the neo4j database presenting... neo4j

I know this is silly - but when you think about it really isn't that stupid. Prezi assumes that there is a "path" to present the prezi. Meaning: I, the presenter will determine how I take you through the information presented. And of course, that process is a bit arbitrary for the attentive listener: every listener has his/her own personal background, knows more or less about technology, and of course, about graph databases in general and neo4j specifically. So it actually could make sense for someone to want to present the information in the prezi in a "freer" format that could be explored randomly by the audience. And that format would be: a neo4j database :) ...

I ended up creating the database with the spreadsheet method that I used before: take a look at the sheet over here. Run the cypher queries to create the nodes in a neo4j 2.0 instance, create the index, and then connect them up with some cypher queries to create the relationships. Or: just download the graph.db directory from over here, and copy it onto your neo4j server. Fire up the awesome neo4j browser, and you will soon be looking at something like this:

It's essentially the same thing as the prezi - just nicer :) ... Neo4j explaining itself to you - with neo4j! How cool is that?

I have also created a little graphgist that you can take a look at. Download the gist from over here.

That's about it. Hope you like it - as always feel free to comment or ping me if you want.